


Stress Blankets

by Bittiface



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff and Crack, Gen, Knitting, alien yarn, sentient yarn, there are better uses of your time than reading this fic yet here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 12:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15819186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bittiface/pseuds/Bittiface
Summary: Set some months after the seventh season, Pidge looks for Lance after not having seen him for a while. What she finds is...





	1. Chapter 1

Pidge walked in on… something. There, in the darkness of Lance’s room she found him surrounded by yarn. There seemed to be several large blankets of various colours, some small stuffed animals made of yarn, and other things unknown to her lodged between all other creations.  Eyes rimmed in red, Lance looked up at Pidge where she stood at the threshold of his door. 

“I can’t stop!” He shrieked from his hovel. Pidge winced. He was  _ spun _ . Clearly he hadn’t slept in a while.

“I just..” She pinched the bridge of her nose, “How did this even  _ start _ ?” She’d come to see if he was okay. He’d gotten over a bit of a cold or something a week ago, and then seemed to never leave his room once he’d gotten better.

 

Lance, without breaking eye contact, continued to knit, his fingers moving on auto-pilot and muscle memory. “Okay, so like, Remember how I lost my voice cause of that bad case of strep throat I caught from that mission with the flying lemur bats?”

Pidge nodded cautiously, setting her laptop down and sitting in front of Lance. “Vaguely, yes.” She remembered it perfectly actually, she just preferred not to dwell on that rather horrendous mission. If she recalled right, it involved a lot of poop bombs and hysterical screaming. 

“ _ Right _ , okay. SO.  _ I was getting really antsy not being able to say what I wanted all the time, and everyone was getting kind of annoyed when I kept using that Speaky toy-- _ ”

“--it was a tablet, Lance--”

“- _ to get you guys to pay attention to me. And then you all locked me in my room cause my cold got worse and I was contagious or something? And then I got super upset and bored, but I found all this  _ **_yarn_ ** _ under the bed-- _ ”

“--wh-when did you even get--”

“ _ And just like, using my hands made me feel busy! So I started knitting a stress blanket to keep the stress away, and then made another and another… _ ”

 

“Lance!” Pidge held up her hand to stop him, the other holding her head in agony. The boy seemed to be making up for lost time without a voice by rambling worse than she did on a sugar rush. She peeked up at him. He was still knitting, his brows knit (heh) together and his mouth in a thin line. It seemed as if holding in the rambling was a physical effort on his part.

“Lance.. You mean to tell me you’ve spent the better part of a week doing nothing but  _ knitting _ ?”

“Stress knitting. Yes Pidge.”

“ _ Stress _ knitting.” Pidge sighed, leaning back on her hands. It would have been impressive were it not so jarringly crazy. “Do.. you feel less stressed now?”

 

Lance stopped the incessant clicking of his knitting needles, then stared down as his frozen hands. “Uh… no.” He furrowed his brows further. Pidge smirked. It was kind of adorable how frazzled he looked. “What are you so stressed about?” She asked soon after, concern laced with curiosity. 

 

“I.. uh..” Lance looked to the side, around at his mountain of projects. He felt a little cornered, and a bit exposed. His hands shook, so he set them down on his lap. “We.. we get into a lot of dangerous and weird situations. And it’s exciting, like,  _ really _ . I love being a Paladin and having all these cool adventures.. But sometimes?” He let himself be a little more vulnerable now, relaxing his shoulders as he eased the weight of his anxieties to the floor.

“Sometimes I just get so  _ anxious _ . Like, we have to be on call 24/7, and my mind and body can’t decide when to actually relax. That last big battle we had.. When we saved Earth. It.. it took a lot out of me, Pidge. I nearly died.. A few times. And I’m just..”  _ Just human _ . Just a boy who was never meant to brush with Death over and over. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

 

Pidge shuffled closer, her own heart pinching in empathy. “I feel you, man. It’s been…” She fought for words, but she was a girl of action. “Hey.. you got a spare set of needles? Mind teaching me?” Lance looked up from his contemplating, blue eyes lighting up with life. “Really?! The great tech wizard wants to knit with me?” He smirked, his natural self shining through. Pidge thought it was all worth it just for that cocky smile. “Why not? If you can do it, I can do it. Besides, I’ve got some stress to work off too.”

  
xxx  
  


Three days. Lance and Pidge seemed to have simply disappeared off the base. Hunk sucked on his bottom lip, worrying as he checked the usual hang outs. Finally, he tried Lance’s room. It was mid day… surely he wouldn’t still be in bed---

He opened to door to pandemonium.

 

Two gremlins, or rather two paladins, lurked in the centre of a colourful yarn filled sea. Hunk froze at the door. Pidge and Lance looked up without breaking from their clicking needles.

“We’re working on an infinity scarf.. That goes on for  _ actual _ infinity.” Pidge remarked with blood shot eyes. 

“Yeah.” Lance agreed from his area of the mess, frantically knitting a blue scarf. “We figure if we both knit a scarf each and attach them later, it’ll go on for  _ past _ infinity.”

 

Hunk shut the door, breathed in deeply, and screamed down the hallway, “CORAAAAAN! SOMETHING  _ SPOOKY _ IS HAPPENING TO LANCE AND PIDGE!”


	2. Infinity Unlocked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If anyone could have done it, Pidge was the one. She had indeed unlocked the secret to infinity, alongside Lance. But in a world where magic and aliens existed, so too did sentient yarn, that when coupled with access to infinity, quickly mutated into an all consuming monster bent on absorbing everyone at the Garrison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added a chapter. It's probably worse than the first. Definitely worse. The crack evolved.

If anyone could have done it, Pidge was the one. She had indeed unlocked the secret to infinity, alongside Lance. But in a world where magic and aliens existed, so too did sentient yarn, that when coupled with access to infinity, quickly mutated into an all consuming monster bent on absorbing everyone at the Garrison. 

Hunk had only just found Shiro, with Keith lagging behind them focused on a cell phone game someone had hooked him on. "They're in here, Shiro. Seriously, they look like they haven't slept in days. I don't know where they end and yarn begins!"

When Hunk had left his two best friends in that room only moments before, they'd been babbling about making an infinity scarf that extended into actual infinity. Clearly they were feverish with some alien space flu.   
When Hunk opened the door next, yarn immediately exploded out, pushing him back with a startled gasp. Shiro took several steps back, knocking Keith over in the process. 

As Shiro stared in horror while yarn seemed to be entangling a shrieking Hunk's limbs, the white haired man decided that maybe it was time to retire. Let the universe save itself. Because clearly sentient yarn was the straw to break the camel's back. Aliens, genocide and world destroying laser beams be damned. Yarn wasn't meant to be sentient or murderous. 

"Iverson? We have a situation.." Shiro stammered into a comm piece in his wrist watch. Keith grumbled behind him, apparently a little pouty that he'd dropped his phone and missed the chance to catch an Evee, and a lot less interested in Hunk's lone hand reaching for help from within the wiggling mass in the hallway.

The mass of yarn began to move, traces of Hunk long gone, but a new form slowly emerged from the doorway, riding the top of the mass like a moving throne. It was Lance, his eyes dancing with dubious delight. 

"I am the the Yarn and the Yarn is me!" He called with shrill laughter. The mass moved with a sudden vigor, launching itself at Shiro who fled around a corner with practiced ease. Keith was lost to the fluffy mass, seemingly impassive to any possible danger. He was sucked in faster than cotton candy dissolves in water.

The Yarn's path to infinity could not be stopped by hallways and classrooms. Not by soldiers with guns or cadets with lunch trays. It was not delayed by a distressed Bae-Bae, or a shrieking Matt. It consumed and it grew.

Shiro was running out of lung capacity, and tried not to question how he'd managed to avoid the reach of The Yarn this long. He locked himself in the command centre, where a few stray survivors looked on through security footage. 

"Can't we just burn it?" Suggested Curtis, alarmed and uncomfortable by something so alien and bizarre. 

"No, we can't." Shiro rasped, doubled over as he tried to get his lungs to work again. "There are people still out there... in there... whatever." Maybe they could find a family of cats to scare it away.

"What about that odd Coran fella?" Iverson asked with the look of a man who'd lived too long to let these things get to him. "He seems to have a lot of weird intel on this sort of thing."

All three of them looked to the footage, and watched as said Altean was swallowed by The Yarn, a laughing Lance flying through the screen moments later. 

Silence fell. 

"Welp." Curtis remarked in deadpan, "This was not how I envisioned my Saturday."

Static suddenly crackled over the comms. Curtis flinched and swung his chair back around to clear it up. The voice on the other end belonged to Pidge.

"Hello? Hello? Can anyone hear me?"

Shiro sighed with relief, "Yes, Pidge. We copy. What's your location?"

"I'm uh.. Inside the Yarn."

Shiro slouched with a groan. Well, at least she was alive, he guessed. Pidge continued on, "We need to reverse infinity. That's the only way to beat this Yarn." Shiro tried not to think too hard on that. Not only was it beyond his comprehension, but he had a different, more pressing concern. "Why didn't it absorb Lance?"

There was a long pause.

"I.. I don't know." Pidge stammered, perplexed. "Maybe they bonded?"

"Sure. Why not." Curtis muttered. This was not his field of expertise either. Anything was game.

"So, Pidge, care to explain how to Reverse the Infinity of The Yarn?" He wasn't sure he wanted to know that, or even how she enabled it to begin with. It was mother flubbing yarn.

"I'd love to. But no time. Reversing Infinity!" Her voice rang out with exuberant anticipation. There was a sudden shift in reality, as if their insides and the air around them was being inverted and spat back out again. As quick as it came, The Yarn was gone from the screens, laving behind a lot of confused and uncomfortable looking Garrison residents. Lance was left clinging to a light fixture above the gymnasium. Shiro looked for Keith on screen, spotting him lying slightly upside down in a stairwell, focused on his game.

Shiro narrowed his eyes.

"I need to start limiting his phone time."

**Author's Note:**

> I mean... it's entirely possible that yarn he used is possessed by the dead souls of grannies that cannot rest in peace. Or something. Thanks for reading!!


End file.
